EXP-CAM: Explanation Generation and Circuit Discovery Using Classifier Activation Matching

Abstract

Machine learning models, by virtue of training, learn a large repertoire of decision rules for any given input, and any one of these may suffice to justify a prediction. However, in high-dimensional input spaces, such rules are difficult to identify and interpret. In this paper, we introduce EXP-CAM: an explanation generation and circuit discovery approach using Classifier Activation Matching. EXP-CAM can generate minimal and faithful explanations for the decisions of pre-trained image classifiers that not only preserve the model's decision but are also concise and human-readable. We aim to identify minimal explanations that not only preserve the model's decision but are also concise and human-readable. To achieve this, we train a lightweight auto-encoder to produce binary masks that learns to highlight the decision-wise critical regions of an image while discarding irrelevant background. The training objective integrates activation alignment across multiple layers, consistency at the output label, priors that encourage sparsity, and compactness, along with a robustness constraint that enforces faithfulness. The minimal explanations so generated also lead us to mechanistically interpreting the model internals. In this regard we also introduce a circuit readout procedure wherein using the explanation's forward pass and gradients, we identify active channels and construct a channel-level graph, scoring inter-layer edges by ingress weight magnitude times source activation and feature-to-class links by classifier weight magnitude times feature activation. Together, these contributions provide a practical bridge between minimal input-level explanations and a mechanistic understanding of the internal computations driving model decisions.